5 - Restrategize

Nova's POV

The bell rang and I didn't move, I couldn't.

Around me, chairs scraped and bags zipped and the class emptied itself with the cheerful efficiency of people who had not just been publicly humiliated in front of twenty-three witnesses. Some people would appreciate this attention given Ryker's reputation but I knew why I was in Crestwood. And this wasn't it. I sat with my hands flat on my desk and my shirt folded in front of me and stared at the middle distance until the room was almost empty.

I had survived worse than this. I had survived a failing heart and a surgery that had a forty percent complication rate and months of waking up gasping from someone else's nightmares. I could survive Ryker Lennox and his terrible sense of humor.

I picked up the shirt. Put it in my bag. Stood up.

"I see you've met Ryker."

Harper was leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed and that smile arranged across her face, the one that lived just slightly too long to be entirely natural. Two of her friends hovered behind her with the particular energy of people who had witnessed something entertaining and were still enjoying it.

"Not really, I don't understand why he has decided to pick on me." I said.

"He's something, isn't he." It wasn't a question. She said it the way people talked about weather they had personal feelings about.

"He's certainly memorable," I said.

She laughed, which was the right response, and fell into step beside me as we moved into the corridor. "Listen," she said, dropping her voice to the register of someone sharing something exclusive. "The party I'm throwing for him, it's this Friday. You should come."

I let a beat pass. "I don't want to intrude on something personal."

"Don't be silly, it's not like that." She waved a hand. "It's just a gathering. Good music, good people." Another beat, and then, quieter, almost directly into my ear: "Chase will be there."

I looked at her.

Her expression was perfectly warm, perfectly open, giving absolutely nothing away except for the very specific thing she had just chosen to give.

"I'd love to come," I said.

She smiled like I'd given her something. "Perfect."

_____________

Friday arrived dressed in its own importance.

I spent forty minutes on Friday afternoon returning three items to the boutique, extending the rental on two others, and negotiating a one-night loan on a dress that I was going to have to be extremely careful in for approximately four hours. The woman behind the counter had stopped asking questions about my situation three weeks ago, which I appreciated.

I showed up at Harper's address at nine, which was late enough to be interesting and early enough to not make a statement about it.

The house was large and lit from every window, music already threaded through the walls like it had been living there all week. I walked up the front path and the door opened before I reached it, which meant someone had been watching, which meant Harper ran her parties the same way she ran everything else.

She appeared in the doorway in something emerald and perfectly fitted, and whatever she had been about to say stalled for just a moment when she saw me.

I had worn the black dress. I was glad I had worn the black dress.

"You look incredible," she said, and I believed her, which was the uncomfortable thing about Harper. The warmth was real. It just existed alongside everything else.

"So do you," I said, and meant it, which was the uncomfortable thing about me.

She ushered me inside with the proprietary ease of someone in their natural habitat, steering me through clusters of people with a hand at my elbow, pointing out who was who and where the drinks were and which corner of the living room had the best acoustics.

Then she angled us toward the far side of the room.

Chase was there. Sitting with two other boys, laughing at something, easy and warm in the way he was always easy and warm, like being in a good mood was a setting he'd never thought to change.

He saw me and his whole face rearranged itself into something I recognized as a problem.

Harper leaned close to my ear. "I haven't technically ended things with him," she murmured, and her voice was light and almost amused, like she was sharing a minor logistical detail. "But you can have him. He's all yours."

She pulled back with the same smile and moved away into the party, and I watched her go with a feeling I didn't have a clean word for. Not quite anger. Not quite pity. Something that lived between them, pressing equally in both directions at once.

I looked at Chase.

He was a good person. I had decided that within the first hour of knowing him, and two weeks of closer observation had not changed my assessment. He was kind in the uncomplicated way of someone who had never been given a reason to be otherwise, and he was developing feelings for me with the same open, uncalculating honesty, and he had no idea that the girl he was starting to like had targeted him, and the girl he was dating had already decided to leave him for someone else.

He deserved better than both of us.

But the harder problem was settling itself somewhere behind my ribs, quiet and cold and requiring attention.

Chase had been my entry point. My angle into Harper's world, the first move in a revenge plan I had built around the assumption that he was her priority, that threatening what she had with him would threaten her. But Harper had just told me, in four words, that Chase was not her priority anymore. Had not been for some time.

Ryker was her priority. Ryker was the whole plan.

Which meant my plan needed a new first move.

I smoothed the front of the borrowed dress and crossed the room toward Chase with a smile I had absolutely not prepared for this situation and a mind already running three steps ahead of where my feet were.

Restrategize, I told myself.

I was still thinking about what that looked like when I felt it, the shift in the room's energy, that particular change in pressure I was starting to recognize.

I didn't have to turn around to know who had just walked in.

But I turned around anyway.

And Ryker Lennox was standing in the doorway of Harper's party looking directly at me like he had been expecting to find me here and had decided, somewhere between the door and this moment, that he found that very interesting indeed.